First Person — Walking the Roads of the Civil War History

In the eight years since my retirement, I have walked more than 4,000 miles retracing the routes of Civil War and Revolutionary War campaigns that took place in the countryside surrounding Richmond, Virginia. Discovering the roads traveled by Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Lafayette, Cornwallis, and their armies has given me the pleasure of reading a great deal of military history, poring over 18^th and 19^th century maps, thrusting myself against the road once a week for an average day’s walk of 15 miles, and savoring the occasional excitement of stumbling onto a historic site that has faded from our nation’s memory.

           The most exciting single discovery I have made is the place where in 1781 Lafayette succeeded in getting his small American army across in front of Cornwallis’s cavalry under Tarleton. Existing records said this occurred behind Mechunk Creek and near Allegree’s, but the creek is several miles long and the location of Allegree’s had been lost. One day, following the colonial Three Chopt Road, I dropped down a steep short hill and crossed a creek on a low bridge. Just beyond I saw a mailbox on which was written the name “Lafayette Encampment Farm.” I walked in and asked the owner if the name meant what it said. He assured me it did, and showed me where Lafayette took position on the hill above the creek so that he could enfilade a column of British troopers riding toward Charlottesville. He added that the white farmhouse I had passed on the hill was the Allegree Tavern of 1781. He pointed it out to me through the trees and across the creek.

           Though finds like that are rare, most days are solidly satisfying and some are unusually interesting. My avocation has become an addiction; I am downright unhappy when I have to miss my weekly walk. Before setting out, the first step is to decide which campaign and which army I am going to follow. My earliest choice was the Appomattox Campaign of April 1865, and the army was the Confederate garrison of Richmond as it dragged its way to Appomattox Court House. Later I retraced the May-June campaign of 1864, which provided me with six routes to follow from Spotsylvania Court House to the North Anna River, two roads used by the Confederates and four used with skill by General Grant to move his large army as rapidly as possible. When the Bicentennial approached, I turned to the Revolutionary War, concentrating on the 1781 campaign, in which Cornwallis invaded Virginia and Lafayette teased him and wore him thin during a hot summer’s marching. 

           Once a particular campaign has been selected, the research begins. For the Confederate side of the Civil War, Douglas Southall Freeman’s books are my authority. Their text is scholarly, detailing just about all that is known, and they contain many maps showing the routes. It is a simple matter to work from them and find the road on a modern county map. 

           Union movements are almost as easy to trace. General A. A. Humphreys’s Virginia Campaigns reads in places like the orders he issued as Meade’s chief of staff, with specific routes and destinations, but his maps are few and unclear. Fortunately, Freeman’s books have to delineate Union movements in order to explain what the Confederate forces were doing.

           The monumental Atlas to Accompany the Official Records must be used warily. Most of its maps are accurate, but some appear to have been drawn by an overheated engineer in the shade of a tree putting down his idea of what the terrain ought to be, and others reveal the difficulty cartographers from Massachusetts and New York had in understanding rural Virginia accents. Samaria Church, for example, is shown as St. Mary’s, and Emmaus Church appears as Emmans. These are things you can learn only on the road, and discovering such mistakes is one of the satisfactions of following the armies’ routes.

           For the Revolutionary War, sources are few. The standard histories concentrate on Yorktown and pass over the “country dance” of Lafayette and Cornwallis “all around Virginia” during the previous summer. Charlemagne Tower’s Lafayette in the American Revolution lists some of the dates at which both armies were at various places. Here one has to interpolate a bit, using old county maps in the State Library and the Virginia Historical Society which show the roads of the period. 

           The roads are still there. In fact, it is estimated that about 95 percent of the Civil War roads and probably 75 percent of the Revolutionary War’s remain in use today — now mostly hard-surfaced, of course, and neatly numbered, but running along the same ridges to avoid floods and dipping down where they must to the same river crossings. Today, however, a river crossing is often a concrete bridge above the highest flood instead of the ford or a low wooden bridge of years gone by.

           Despite modern improvements, most of these are ordinary country roads with nothing to show that once they were filled with Redcoats or Virginia militia in hunting shirts, with Boys in Blue or Boys in Grey. As I walk along them, I don’t try to see ghosts of the past but enjoy what is here now: woods and fields, roadside flowers changing with the seasons, the birds that fly across my path, the dogs at every farmhouse that bark and then come out to sniff my hand, white contrails from planes crisscrossing the sky, and railroad trains passing on tracks that brought Stonewall Jackson’s Army of the Valley to join Lee in the defense of Richmond. Yet when I get home, I know that I have seen a bit of history.

           It is the small percentage of roads which are no longer in use that provides the spice. For example, the Civil War Atlas shows that Grant moved one of his corps toward the James River by a road about two miles long between presently identifiable points, but today’s maps show only a dirt stub less than a mile long going in from the northern point. As I followed it, I reflected that this dirt stub was probably closer to the condition of actual 1864 roads than any other I had ever traveled — never paved, never even scraped to shape, heavily rutted, and with grass growing between the wheel tracks. It ended in front of a ramshackle residence, and woods grew across the end.

           Nonetheless, I pushed into the woods, recognizing traces of the road on the ground. Especially on the grades, decades of hoof and wheel traffic had left their mark in the earth. For a while a fence showed where once the road had been the boundary of a farm and confirmed my path. Across a swampy area a low fill had been built, and I was surprised to see a drainage pipe through this — probably early 20^th century. I pushed branched out of my way, occasionally detouring around an impenetrable thicket of briars, but never losing some trace of the road for more than a couple of hundred feet. After a little more than a mile, I came out on the river road where Grant’s men had a century ago. It was a beautiful day.

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John E. Damerel ’27 was personnel director for the City of Richmond the last 15 years before his retirement. He was appointed to the State of Virginia Bicentennial Commission map committee when it learned of his hobby, and many of the roads on its Revolutionary War map were research by him.

This was originally published in the September 11, 1978 issue of PAW.